A Design a Day – Day 122

Here is the gold and diamond leaf brooch I designed two days ago, this time rendered using watercolors (to see the ink and gouache, and ink/yellow ink and gouache versions, please see Day 120 and 121):

I always test whatever media I’m using on a scrap piece of paper identical to what I’m using for my rendering. This allows me to check the colors, consistency of the paint or ink, and sharpness of pencil tips, before I work on my actual art work.

If you are curious to see what combination of colors goes into creating a gold metal rendering, please read on.

Watercolor Test Sheet with Yellow Gold Paint Guide

You can see the colors used to create “gold” in jewelry rendering on the right hand side of my scratch piece of paper above. The top swatch, or dull yellow brown, is used to fill in all of the gold areas of the object. The second darker brown color is used to create the preliminary suggestion of shadows. The darkest brown, partially overlapping with the previous color, deepens the shadows. The 4th color (dark lemon yellow) is used as a base for building the highlights. These highlights are then overlapped with bright lemon yellow highlights. Finally, the tangerine orange color is used sparingly to give hints of highlights along the darkest values in the rendering. This helps to bring final richness to the gold metal. I also added a few touches of white gouache paint to further enhance the gold highlights.

Come back tomorrow to see this design (white metal version) reproduced using charcoal and gouache.